The Brunel University Prize for African Poetry

The brunel University prize for African poetry seeks out the best poems from poets across Africa each poet submits 10 poems, the shortlist was released on the 16th of march 2017, and the winner(s) will be announced on the 2nd of may 2017

Sahro Ali

Her Nationality and Poem

Sahro is from Somalia

Daughters

In Morocco two girls are jailed for homosexuality. My mother pulls apart my legs in fear with her Filching fingers.Where is my daughter? Is she here? Mouth shut with hot wax, burbling and yellow A bee’s nest has found itself in her throat & she tries To cough it into me.You are my daughter are you not? Her friend tells her the best way to keep me safe is To sew me shut, ‘a bird cannot fly if you clip its wings.’ My mother’s fingers shake around the needle and thread She’s a quiet, polite madness, her cheeks fat with salveI’m just trying to find my daughter I’m sorry There’s something crawling down my stomach but it can’t Find its way out, I stick my hand up my pussy one last time. I birth a black dog, and let my mother lick the meat off its bones A bee pops out onto the surgery table and I try to speak through The honey in my mouth. I put my hand on top of her shaking ones, teeth at the threadIts fine you’ve found her

Leila Chatti

Her Nationality and Poem

Leila Chatti is from Tunisia

fasting in tunis

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. – Robert Hass

My God taught me hunger is a gift, it sweetens the meal. All day, I have gone without because I know at the end I will eat and be satisfied. In this way, my desire is bearable.

I endure this day as I have endured years of days without the whole of your affection. Your desire is one capable of rest. Mine keeps its eyes open, stalks through heat that quivers, waits to be fed.

The sun burns a hole through the sky and I am patient. The ocean eats and eats at the sand and still hungers. I watch its wide blue tongue, knowing you are on the other side.

What is greater: the distance between these bodies, or their need?

Noon gapes, a vacant maw— there is long to go until the moon is served, white as a plate. You are far and still sleeping; the morning has not yet slunk into your bed, its dreams so vast and solitary.

Once, long ago, I touched you, and I will touch you again— your mouth a song I remember, your mouth a sugar I drink.

Kayo Chingonyi

His Nationality and Poem

Kayo is from Gambia

The Colour of James Browns’s Screamfor Stephen McCarthy and Todd Bracey

I have known you by many names but today, you are Larry Levan, your hand on the platter, in the smoky room of a Garage regular’s memory. You are keeping WhenDove’s Cry in time, as you swing your hips, and sweat drips from your hair the colour of James Brown’s scream.King of King Street, we are still moving to the same sound, though some of us don’t know it is your grave we dance on, cutting shapes machismo lost to the beat– every road man is a sweetboy if the DJ plays Heartbroken at just the right time for these jaded feet. Teach us to shape-shift, Legba, you must know I’d know your customary shuffle, that phantom limp, anywhere; that I see your hand in the abandon of a couple, middle of the floor, sliding quick and slick as a skin-fade by the hand of a Puerto Rican clipper-man who wields a cutthroat like a paintbrush. Let us become like them, an ode to night, ordering beer in a corporeal language from a barman who replies by sweeping his arms in an arc, Willi Ninja style, to fix a drink our lips will yearn for, a taste we’ve been trying to recreate ever since.

Saddiq Dzukogi

His Nationality and Poem

Saddiq is from Nigeria

father’s demise

the opaque face of things like stone & water

& my extended family fighting while the village expects us to soak

in a seawater of mourning father’s demise is a dispersing light

I kept grumbling at the moment of his passing my siblings each

are trying to hide their happiness my shadow is only good at imitating

my posture only grandmother owned a genuine grief the moon hanging

by the window is unable to wash off her sadness night won’t penetrate her eyes

my father’s brother looks like he is hiding his schemes intimate like a lonely wife & her pillow

he has always held what is father’s in the same way a best man

looks at the bride he is secretly in love with my mother once told her friend

he had come to her tiptoeing wanting to wear my father’s shoes

but later found my mother’s body a room too big for his foot

my mother didn’t know I broke the meaning of her metaphor like she breaks kola

for those who have now come to mourn sad stories are stretching the size

of our sitting room into a market I locked myself in a dirty toilet

the stench there less than a family’s hypocricy

Yalie Kamara

Her Nationality and Poem

Kalie is from Sierra Leone

Mother’s Rules

For my mother

I. If you see me praying in the living room, never sit in front of me. You are not God.

II. When we go to a restaurant and I don’t know any foods on the menu, never order me a meal that is spelled with silent letters. I came to eat, not to explore

IV. Your Krio is offensive. When you speak, you sound like Shabba Ranks. Your accent is funny, but keep practicing. It is the only way we will be able to gossip in peace while at the supermarket.

V. Try to learn the language of your lover and his family. They could be smiling to your face and getting ready to trade you for 6 goats and 3 mules during your first trip to their homeland.

VI. If anyone stares at you for too long (more than 5 seconds), start speaking an imaginary language while maintaining eye contact. They will be the first to look away.

VII. Consider the consequence of purchasing human hair wigs, second hand clothing, and used furniture. Maybe you will feel beautiful, and also save money, but you never know whose bad luck or misfortune will be sitting on your head, body, or in the home in which you sleep. Buy what you can truly afford.

VIII. Your father’s Muslim, so you are too (1989-1993). I am Christian, so you are too (1993-2012). I am Catholic now, but you keep praying (2012-present).

IX. You laugh at me now. Like I laughed at my mother. Like she laughed at hers. Like your daughters will laugh at you. And I will live long enough to forgive your folly.

X. Just make sure to pray.

Amen.

Kechi Nomu

Her Nationality and Poem

Kechi is from Nigeria

Note to the Boy Kicking the Stone

The boy’s body bends to pick the stone

And you see how his body too is a road with curves, too many

curves

Once or twice, you see the bones of his vertebrae become hills

Here, a story begins rises, falls and ends in ghosts.

Richard Oduor Oduku

His Nationality and Poem

Richard is from Kenya

The Old White Man and the Bungalow on 5th Avenue

He walks the pavements in boxer shorts too brief for a stuffed groin and spindly legs that drop flakes of dry skin with each laboured step

he never leaves his fez behind his browline glasses nor his book, the Tibetan Book of the Dead but you can tell he is most happy on Saturdays when he stops to speak to streets boys and give them sweets and bread

we are seated on the terrace, nursing whisky and Shangri-Las’ Out in the Streets – a mix of teen-beat puppy love and nostalgia sitar drones and psychedelics: a world of Beatles and porous borders

then he leans forward and tells me a story

“we started from the Atlantic shores on a forlorn stretch of brick-red outposts and centuries-old souks singing on the backs of camels battling winds and scorpions and the silence of the Sahara

in the kingdom of sand the only god is an oasis and when the pink skies poured over us we cuddled in desert camps and emptied our tote bags of want into each other – under pickled stars

everything was fine, everything! until that summer of 1984 in Morocco when I was stirred from the milkshake of sleep by the hiss of a horned viper slithering away from a cold body:

the guile of the desert took her away I left her bones to desiccate in the sands and escaped the haunt of shared memories to Kenya – a country I barely knew to start a new life of abridged joy in this bungalow on 5th Avenue.”

Romeo Oriogun

His Nationality and Poem

Romeo is from Nigeria

Invisible Man

And the voice was a lost bird embedded in a boy like a word stranded between pages.

He said flee from the heat wrecking your body and you ran to a place where water running over pebbles is a whisper of wildness, where lost boys are birds hiding their heads under wings as they touch their wetness in the dark and whisper hallelujah.

The radio said, a father shot his son for loving another man. Marvin Gaye lives in the heart of a black drag queen and to be a song of pebbles and water is to run into a city of light and surrender your throat to the song of a bird.

On the streets of Lagos, a boy searches for himself in mirrors, he opens his heart and hears the voice of his father breaking his bones into a prince collecting burnt teeth lying as warning on holy grounds.

This is how we kill love; hunting it in the dark when it is soft like a newborn chick, breaking its bones till it becomes a boy filled with dead men.

Rainfall teaches the ground how to breed: a boy learns about the wetness of his thighs on a cold night. Poster of boys diving into water holds him in a trance. A horse hears the coming of speed rising in his blood; a horse responds to the call of wild hills as water tickles the sky.

Wet dreams: a boy hears the whisper of another boy deep in his bones and wonders about the origin of stars, his body is a lamp learning how to give light in a place where a boy opens his mouth from the door of a tomb; where a boy takes his first breath and resurrects into life; where a boy learns how to make honey out of a skin.

This is how to live: a resurrected boy hides in dark bars and stare at muscles of hard men. He is called Joe, he is called John, he is called The Wind and that is how to be unseen.

And this is real: a man hides his voice in a throat before bursting out into songs.

Verbs are boys learning how to kiss, like you turning your body into a blue sea; turning your lips into pictures of love. Like you opening your body into a little island; opening your skin into a beautiful world.

Verbs are boys learning how to love in a place where death lives in water.

One step at a time. A boy learns how to dance, his voice is a stream learning the music of the ocean. He opens his mouth and paints blue skies with the magic of flying. He opens his hands and flowers plait the air with music.

One step at a time. A man kisses another man and hears bullets hitting his windows. A man kisses another man and hears a mob running on his skin. A man lies on the edge of bliss and hears the rape of boots on doors, still we rise with the sun and plant seeds of love in dark places; still we love and hide and wait for rapture inside a boy’s body as a voice flirts with the birds in his throat, while a man burns on a street in Lagos for singing too loud

Rasaq Malik

His Nationality and Poem

Rasaq is from Nigeria

After My Grandma’s Burial

We sit on the benches at the facade of our house, my mother in a dark gown, my father attending to visitors, the children staring at the grave of my grandma, their thoughts too frail to decipher the meaning of burying a beloved. At night we remember those who are not lucky enough to have a decent burial, those who lie in unknown places, those who find solace in caressing the photographs of their lost relatives, those who are murdered in the cold of war, those who wake up to see bullet holes on their doors, those who learn how to pray as they wilt in the fire of bombs, those who pass through the dark as they carry the burden of war. At night we listen to the voices of our beloveds in the walls of empty rooms, in the leaves that sway as wind blows, in the silence that thickens as we remember how death happens, how we become dust, scraps in the kitchen, fossils for earth to devour, bones that never rise no matter the force of rain.

Nick Makoha

His Nationality and Poem

Nick is from Uganda

Candidate A

For the record, he loves his own reflection, this farmer’s son from the delta. A splendid type.

Bone from the neck up, trained in wickedness, born to lead, useful against the Mau Mau.

Unprovoked, he once cracked a cow’s skull with flat palms as the beast stared at him.

Did the same to three cattle herders at Lake Turkana. Reached into their necks to eat their intestines (allegedly).

He should have been court-martialled, especially after the assassination attempt.

Such men rise in the ranks and can only be removed by death or revolt. I suggest we seduce him with wives.

Surround him with ceremony, regulation and rules even though secretly he feels they do not apply to him.

Feed him with titles: His Excellency, Field Marshall, Effendi etcetera. His cravings have no limit.

We can use distrust of competition to our advantage. He will demand acclaim in an unbridled urge to destroy.

Easily compensated, he does not accumulate goods or possessions for the future, opting for immediate gratification.

While he buys friends, kills citizens without fear of god or religion, in his effort to be remembered, we will make our mark.

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